An Exploration of Writing - Peter T. Daniels
Words and Heterogams
An Exploration of Writing - Peter T. Daniels
Peter T. Daniels [+]
Independent Scholar
Peter T. Daniels, the world’s leading expert on writing systems, holds degrees in linguistics from Cornell University and the University of Chicago. His first interests were in Comparative Semitic linguistics, which built to the study of writing and decipherment. His challenge to his teacher I. J. Gelb’s influential theories of the evolution of scripts has led to a persistent search for legitimate principles of the nature and development of writing. He is co-editor (with William Bright) of and principal contributor to The World’s Writing Systems (1996) and is hte author of An Exploration of Writing (Equinox, 2018).
Description
Another innovative way of looking at writing systems as a whole is to take together three highly disparate writing systems (again, the Iranian has been unknown to the general reader) that share the characteristic of incorporating what appear to be words of an earlier language whose script has been adapted for the newer one. Scholars in each field have not noticed that the writing system they have mastered is not quite so unique as it appears to them to be.